Question: hi jen (: how do you think that the 'blank slate' thory could be applied to the idea of the in-built survival/ talents of children born today? and do you think that the past survival needed could be carried or 'remembered' by the DNA and now are being seen as a talent?

Jen Todd Jones answered on 19 Mar 2013:

Hi caramel!

This is a great question, thanks for posting it here! This is a hotly debated issue in science, and we’re still not sure we can conclusively swing one way or the other about how much information is ‘built in’ to us.

Around fifty years ago a man called B F Skinner (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._F._Skinner) proposed the idea that all children are born as ‘blank slates’ or ‘tabula rasa’ in Latin. This meant that any baby was born with no automatic functions and that it learned absolutely everything by interacting with the world and other people. This was supported by stories about feral or wild children (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_child) who, without any interaction with the human world, behaved like animals and could not be taught how to behave like humans. Scientists assumed this meant that we are not born as fully functional human beings but are trained to become them – James Watson a related scientist to Skinner even said:

“Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select — doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors.”

Pretty extreme stuff! So a huge amount of research was performed in response to this very extreme point of view. I’ll talk about two examples that I think are usually used as the best ideas related to blank slate theory. First the visual cliff experiment (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6cqNhHrMJA) which is an experiment involving placing children on a glass box, half of which has a solid bottom and the other half falls away. When newborns are placed on this box they will crawl all over it without fear, but a toddler will not go across the ‘cliff’ even though they would still be safe on top of the glass because they have learned to fear falling off edges. This was used as evidence that children only learn things since the babies didn’t avoid the cliff, but later on this was countered by a study that put newborns in mobile little seats so that they could move around – and in this case they would also not cross the cliff, even though they had not learned to walk and therefore had not learned to be afraid of edges. Those scientists argued that the babies must have something inbuilt which makes them fear edges and falling, which would be a very sensible thing to be passed along at birth!

Another argument for having ‘in built’ processes is language, babies are happy to listen to sounds from any language in the world when they are born but soon develop a preference for the language they hear the most, usually theirs mothers’ language. Children then learn language incredibly quickly, almost surprisingly quickly – by the age of 5 we know around 6000 words, we understand grammar (like pauses in sentence, and what the mean) and also syntax (the format of sentences and that some words are necessary for language to make sense). Where did we learn all this? Do we really teach children every single thing they learn about language? Or do they have an in-built process that explains why every language in the world has different language sounds and even characters for writing, but all have roughly the same format? This man, Steven Pinker (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Pinker), thinks children are born with language abilities and these grow over time – so children are *not* blank slates.

The answer to your question, as you can see, is not straightforward! We don’t know the answer to this yet, so if you were thinking about becoming a scientist you could come and help us out!

Jen